Machine Learning for Decision Support in Tax and Accounting

A lot of machine learning applications in business can be boiled down to some form of decision support. There are big decisions like deciding whether or not to merge or acquire another company, and there might be smaller decisions like whether or not a tumor has enough traits that make it seem like it's worth a surgical procedure or if it's worth leaving alone.

In this particular interview, we talk about the domain of decision support, specifically in tax and accounting. There are few firms that know more about tax and accounting than Ernst & Young, and there are few people at Ernst & Young who know more about artificial intelligence than Sharda Cherwoo. Cherwoo is a partner at EY, and she is also the Intelligent Automation Leader for the Americas division of its tax practice.

Cherwoo talks about where decision support is being influenced by machine learning in accounting and tax today, the initial experimentation traction, and results. She also paints a picture of bigger decisions that might be automatable by machine learning software. The focus of this episode may be on tax and accounting, but here are transferable lessons for business leaders in all industries that revolve around how machine learning can help inform decisions made by human experts.